"Tell Me Something Before I Show You is a triumph, a deeply compassionate, honest, and hopeful book, filled with humor and grace and characters that navigate life's uncertainties with wit and tenderness."
-Andrew Porter, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and author of The Imagined Life and The Disappeared
Darkly funny, intimate stories about secrets, shame, and the strange truths that surface when ordinary lives crack open.
In these darkly funny, sharply intimate stories, the ordinary world keeps opening onto something stranger: a childhood secret hidden beside a lake, a fertility idol unearthed at a wedding, a murdered husband who may exist only in his wife's dreams, a vanished celebrity whose drowning reawakens an old grief, a family performance that curdles into revelation, a dying father's house waiting to be emptied.
The characters in Tell Me Something Before I Show You are often standing at the edge of disclosure. A lonely boy follows another child through the dark toward Lake Champlain, where friendship, desire, and danger become impossible to separate. A middle-aged couple attends an Elvis Costello-themed wedding while privately weighing a life-altering decision. A retired woman dreams again and again that she has killed the husband she loves. A former climber turns a cottage into a rental and finds himself haunted less by the guests to come than by the man he used to be. A young sword swallower discovers that the things we fail to digest may be more dangerous than the blade itself.
By turns tender, absurd, unsettling, and devastating, these stories explore the private myths people build around love, shame, aging, family, sexuality, faith, regret, and the lives they might have lived. Here, monsters may or may not be real. Ghosts may or may not be dreams. A joke may become a confession. A costume may reveal more than it conceals. And the smallest invitation - tell me something - may be the beginning of a life permanently changed.
For readers of literary fiction that blends emotional precision with a touch of the uncanny, Tell Me Something Before I Show You is a collection about secrets: the ones we keep, the ones we inherit, and the ones that wait patiently for us to become ready to speak.
